Benedict Cumberbatch To Star In James Gray's The Lost City Of Z

Benedict Cumberbatch is everywhere we turn nowadays, and today he's found yet another way to continue his ubiquitousness streak. Deadline is reporting out of the Toronto International Film Festival that the Sherlock star is now attached to play the lead role in The Lost City of Z, the long in-development adaptation of David Grann's book that director James Gray is attached to helm.

If the title sounds familiar it may be because the project has been around since 2008. For a long time Brad Pitt was set to play the story's lead, British soldier/spy Percy Fawcett, though he left the movie all the way back in November of 2010. Gray, however, has been attached from the very beginning, and in the time since has directed the dramatic mystery The Immigrant with Jeremy Renner (which premiered at Cannes earlier this year), and written the script for the Clive Owen-starring crime thriller Blood Ties.

Set in 1925, the new film centers on Fawcett as he travels into the depths of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil searching for a civilization. When he discovers the mythical Lost City of Z he is excited to share the news with his peers - but nobody believes him. In order to prove his discovery is legitimate, Fawcett goes back into the jungle with his son to try and get proof. The book is based on a true story and in reality Fawcett and his son were never seen or heard from again.

Cumberbatch will be all over the Toronto International Festival in the next couple weeks, as he has three movies that will be getting their debut during the event. First up we have Steve McQueen's 12 Years A Slave, which is already riding on big buzz thanks to a very successful premiere at Telluride:

Then there's Bill Condon's The Fifth Estate, in which Cumberbatch will be starring as notorious journalist Julian Assange:

In addition to all of that, we will soon be seeing new episodes of Sherlock, and hearing Cumberbatch's voice come out of a dragon in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. It's a shame that we won't get to see him work with Guillermo del Toro on Crimson Peak, but I guess his dance card is pretty full up at this point.